So far, so good, I'm able to style it myself in terms of item sorting, link layout and bg colors when somebody browses the page directly. However, I would also like to link our CSS stylesheet to style the appearance of H1 and link hovers. But when I add a <link> in the XML to the CSS, nothing seems to happen (both normally and using the xml stylesheet format above). I then tried putting the <link> in the XSL <head>, but this didn't work either. No errors, just no styling.

In the end, I solved it myself - I was keen to link the stylesheet from the xsl rather than the xml, if possible, since I guess that should save bandwidth for me and the users because it will be called less often (ie in a dedicated newsreader it displays the feed in a different way).

Anyway, as far as I can tell, the problem was to do with case sensitivity differences between xml and css. When I changed my css to make it all lower case, it all worked. I had been using "A:hover" before, which was ok for html but not for this.